James.galbraith

41,549,808.

Well, it’s official. Georgia Democratic Senators-elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are going to Washington. The Senate will be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that, with Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote, Democrats will have the narrowest possible majority in the Senate.

If the Senate were anything approaching a democratic institution, however, the Democratic Party would have a commanding majority in Congress’s upper house. The Senate is malapportioned to give small states like Wyoming exactly as many senators as large states like California — even though California has about 68 times as many residents as Wyoming.

Because smaller states tend to be whiter and more conservative than larger states, this malapportionment gives Republicans an enormous advantage in the fight for control of the Senate. Once Warnock and Ossoff take their seats, the Democratic half of the Senate will represent 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.

I derived this number by using 2019 population estimates from the United States Census Bureau. In each state where both senators belong to the same party, I allocated the state’s entire population to that party. In states with split delegations, I allocated half of the state’s population to each party. I coded Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-ME) as Democrats. Although both men identify as independents, they caucus with the Democratic Party.

You can check my work using this spreadsheet.

It’s worth highlighting just how much of an advantage Republicans derive from Senate malapportionment. In the 25 most populous states, Democratic senators will hold a 29-21 seat majority once Warnock and Ossoff are sworn in. Republicans, meanwhile, have an identical 29-21 majority in the 25 least populous states.

The 25 most populous states contain nearly 84 percent of the 50 states’ total population. So 16 percent of the country controls half of the seats in the United States Senate (and that’s not accounting for the fact that DC, Puerto Rico, and several other US territories have no representation at all in Congress).

American democracy, in other words, is profoundly undemocratic. And it is undemocratic in large part because our Constitution does not provide for free and fair elections in the Senate. A commanding majority of the nation elected a Democrat to the United States Senate, but half of all senators will be Republicans.

Worse, because of the filibuster, virtually no legislation will pass Congress unless it wins the approval of at least 10 Republicans. If Senate Democrats all hang together, they will be able to pass an occasional spending bill through a process known as “reconciliation.” But no voting rights legislation, no legislation reforming the courts, and no legislation regulating business — or regulating much of anything else, for that matter — will pass Congress without at least some Republican approval.

Meanwhile, if Republicans want to block any of President-elect Joe Biden’s nominees to any court or to any executive branch position, they will only need to convince one Democrat to oppose that person and the nomination will fail.

This way of governing does not reflect the fact that Democrats represent nearly 42 million more people than Republicans do in the Senate. But due to Senate malapportionment, it’s what we’ll end up with anyway.

Election Twitter was blown away by Black voter turnout in the Georgia Senate runoffs.

More than any other factor, the high turnout from Black voters in Georgia’s Senate runoff elections appears to have won Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff their seats and their party control of the US Senate.

Warnock’s victory over Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Ossoff’s win over Sen. David Perdue have been called by Decision Desk. Perdue has announced plans to challenge the results of his race; the contest was within the legal recount threshold as of Wednesday morning.

It was a historic night: Georgia made Warnock the second Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. The big reason, according to Twitter’s most widely followed election analysts, was the remarkable level of Black turnout. Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, who has also declared victory for both Democrats, called the figures “phenomenal.”

Turnout was high in general, hitting more than 80 percent of the turnout in the November general election. But turnout rates were slightly higher in Democratic strongholds (north of 90 percent in general) and especially in predominantly Black precincts.

Those margins, especially in populous and heavily Black Fulton and DeKalb counties, were decisive for the Democrats. Warnock’s 50,000-vote lead is significantly larger than President-elect Joe Biden’s 13,000-vote win over President Donald Trump in November; Ossoff is also currently outpacing the president-elect’s margin of victory. Randolph County — a small, rural majority Black community — essentially matched its November turnout; and a number of suburban Black counties reached 90 percent or more of their November numbers.

According to CNN’s exit poll, Ossoff saw his share of Black voters grow from 87 percent in the November general to 92 percent in the January runoff. It’s difficult to compare Black turnout in the general and runoff election for Warnock since his November race featured more than a dozen candidates, including several Democrats. However, both CNN and NBC News exit polls found that Warnock won 92 percent of Black voters against Loeffler.

The Democratic advantage with Hispanic voters also grew from November to January, with CNN’s Ryan Struyk reporting a 28 percent increase in support for Ossoff among that demographic.

Black voter turnout has been the focus of former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams’s campaign to turn Georgia blue over the last four years. The New Georgia Project, which she co-founded, has registered 500,000 people to vote since 2014. As Vox’s Anna North has reported, many other organizations, such as the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, also worked toward increasing Black voter participation.

“We knocked on our 2 millionth door yesterday, we’ve made 5 million phone calls, 3 million text messages to Georgia voters,” Nsé Ufot, CEO of the voting rights group New Georgia Project, told Vox’s Ella Nilsen ahead of the runoffs. “We were all surprised with the results of the November election, and I maintain Georgia is a battleground state.”

Activists rooted in other communities — including Latino and Asian American — did similar work.

Abrams fell short in her own bid to be governor in 2018. But Georgia has now delivered twice for Democrats in the 2020 elections, first helping cement Biden’s win over Trump and now securing control of the Senate in the runoffs.

Democrats will hold the edge with a split Senate, giving them a shot at governing.

Winning a pair of January 5 Senate runoffs in Georgia, Democrats have regained control of the US Senate, but just barely.

By capturing Georgia’s Senate seats — an impressive feat few political observers thought likely after the November election — Democrats have given themselves the barest of Senate majorities. They are technically split 50-50 with Republicans, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker for simple majority votes. Importantly, though, it will be Democrat Chuck Schumer, not Republican Mitch McConnell, who will hold the title of majority leader.

Tuesday’s victory solidifies the party’s control of Congress as President-elect Joe Biden prepares to take office with an ambitious policy agenda. It guarantees Democrats will at least be able to decide what bills make it to the Senate floor, as well as be able to more easily confirm Biden’s Cabinet appointments and judicial nominees.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Still, Democrats will have to get buy-in from at least 10 additional Republican senators in order to clear the 60-vote threshold needed to pass most major bills. They may be able to work around the filibuster in budget reconciliation bills, but getting broad bipartisan support to pass most legislation will be unavoidable.

Senate Democrats and Biden clearly see their first priorities as trying to curb the spread of Covid-19 with additional relief and funding for vaccine distribution and a more coordinated federal and state response to the pandemic. Economic recovery is another immediate priority, which could include an infrastructure package.

“We feel a great sense of responsibility and a great sense of urgency,” Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), chair of the Senate Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, told Vox last fall. “There’s so much that has to be rebuilt and repaired, but it has to start with getting our arms around this once-in-a-generation pandemic.”

Infrastructure could be one of the few opportunities for bipartisanship; a number of moderate Republicans are willing to work on such a bill, but other Republicans have already begun to raise concerns about the national deficit and additional spending after themselves passing a massive tax cut in 2017 that ballooned the deficit. Still, Biden, who served as a senator for decades before becoming Obama’s vice president, has a long working relationship with McConnell in the Senate. This could prove to be an asset going into his presidency.

“President-elect Biden, one of his strengths is reaching out and finding common ground,” Phil Schiliro, who served as President Barack Obama’s legislative director, told Vox. Schiliro added that Biden and McConnell “have a shared experience and history in the Senate; they have a shared respect for the Senate, and I think that’s helpful.”

Realistically, the likelier scenario for a closely divided Senate is more partisan gridlock.

What Democrats want to do

Democrats widely agree a new Covid-19 relief and response package should be their first priority. A new bill would likely be modeled on the House-passed HEROES Act, which included $75 million for testing and contact tracing, “strike teams” to tackle challenges around long-term care and prisons, and funding to help cash-strapped state and local governments.

Next, Democrats say they want to deal with the stagnating economy. Biden has released a $2 trillion green jobs plan, aiming to create millions of jobs through green infrastructure, retrofitting houses, and manufacturing electric cars, among other things. There are a number of ways Biden’s White House can work on achieving these goals, but he needs Congress to fully realize it.

“In addition to fighting and containing the coronavirus, we will work aggressively to create jobs and improve the unemployment crisis caused by President Trump,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told Vox in a statement earlier this fall.

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Biden shares the broad goal of getting the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050, but he’s also set more aggressive targets, like getting to 100 percent clean electricity in the US by 2035. House Democrats also passed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill in July, which could be merged with Biden’s climate plan.

Democrats will likely push for a climate component in any future infrastructure package, but Republicans may balk at that idea and push for a more targeted bill.

Democrats have a long wish list of other priorities including anti-corruption reforms and legislation to expand voting rights (which, again, is the first bill that will be taken up by the US House), policing reforms, and a public option to expand access to health care as well as immigration reform and universal background checks for guns.

Many of these will have to be put on the back burner for now, as Democrats have limited political capital — and the thinnest possible majority to do anything.

Senate Democrats and the filibuster

Once again, Democrats fall short of the filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate majority — by a whopping 10 votes.

The last time Democrats won a majority in the Senate was in 2008, when they rode Obama’s coattails to victory. They had 59 votes in the Senate, far more than Democrats do now.

Obama was able to pull over a few Republican Senate votes in 2009 to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act after the 2008 financial crisis. But on many other legislative priorities, McConnell’s Republican minority threw up a 60-vote barrier to passing most Democratic legislation.

McConnell admitted two years into the Obama era that he had planned to do everything he could to ensure the Obama presidency was “one term.” The former president wrote in his new memoir that the filibuster “would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency.”

Kevin Dietsch/AFP via Getty Images

“With President Obama, no matter how much outreach he tried to do with Congressional Republicans, there seemed to be absolutely no interest and no acceptance with what he was trying to do,” Schiliro said. “If congressional Republicans take that approach this time, it will be very difficult to get anything done.”

Democrats have a few options with 51 votes: attempt to work with Republicans on bipartisan issues, or pass big items through a process known as budget reconciliation that only requires a simple majority. Much less likely is blowing up the Senate filibuster. Doing so would require 51 votes, but moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) have unequivocally said they’re opposed.

“That would break the Senate,” Manchin told the New York Times’s Luke Broadwater recently. “If you basically do away with the filibuster altogether for legislation, you won’t have the Senate. You’re a glorified House. And I will not do that.”

Still, some Democrats may continue to push for filibuster elimination or reform by a simple majority. Their argument? Don’t assume Senate Republicans are going to do the right thing.

“Basically, every member of the conference is concerned about not letting McConnell paralyze the place,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the Democrat leading talks about filibuster reform, told Vox earlier this year.

Ossoff’s win in Georgia is crucial for Democrats.

Democrat Jon Ossoff has won a Georgia Senate seat, beating Republican David Perdue in one of the state’s pivotal runoffs on Tuesday.

The race was called by Vox’s elections partner Decision Desk at 2:14 am ET.

Ossoff is the second Georgia Democrat to win in the January 5 runoff election. Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock also won his race late on Tuesday night, per a call from Vox’s elections partner Decision Desk. Crucially, Ossoff’s victory means Democrats have now won the two seats required to retake control of the Senate.

Ossoff is a former investigative journalist who ran for Congress in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District in 2017, narrowly losing to Republican Karen Handel in a runoff. Few elections experts in Georgia predicted he would beat Perdue, given the Democrat fell about 88,000 votes behind Perdue in November. Ossoff’s win two months later suggests higher enthusiasm for Democratic candidates and weaker enthusiasm for Republicans.

Ossoff and Warnock’s victories come on the heels of President-elect Joe Biden being the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992. House Democrats also flipped their only GOP-held district of 2020 in Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District, in Atlanta’s suburbs.

These big wins for Democrats signify a shift in Georgia’s diversifying electorate.

“The state is becoming younger and more diverse every day,” Ossoff told Vox in an interview this fall. “The investment in Democratic infrastructure over the last decade has been massive.”

Ossoff’s win is also a firm rebuke of President Donald Trump in a Senate race that the outgoing president made largely about him and his November loss in Georgia. Ossoff’s Republican opponent, Perdue, was one of Trump’s earliest allies in the Senate, and a staunch defender of the president after the November 3 election. Perdue and fellow Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler backed Trump in his battle with Georgia Republican state officials, counting on the president’s support in the state to power them to victory.

That support ultimately didn’t materialize.

What Ossoff’s win means for Senate control and Biden’s agenda

Joe Biden may have won the presidency on November 3, but he doesn’t have much chance to deliver on the bold agenda he’s proposed without buy-in from Congress.

Biden is entering office facing multiple crises: The Covid-19 pandemic is worsening in the US even as vaccines start to be delivered across the country, and there are still millions out of work due to coronavirus-related layoffs. After months of partisan gridlock, Congress managed to pass a $900 billion economic relief package before the new year. Biden has said he wants more economic stimulus, but whether a future package can pass will largely be determined by which party controls the Senate.

“The power is literally in your hands. Unlike any time in my career, one state can chart the course — not just for the next four years, but for the next generation,” Biden said at a Monday rally in support of Ossoff and Warnock.

Even with this victory, Democrats will have to contend with Senate Republicans. Securing both Georgia seats gives Democrats 50 seats in the Senate, plus Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as a crucial tie-breaker for simple majority votes. The catch is that most bills need to clear a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. Therefore, even if Democrats have control of the Senate, they will generally need around 10 Republican votes to get things done.

Passing Democratic bills will be extremely difficult in a 50-50 Senate. It will be tough to even pass broad bipartisan bills. But winning Georgia’s seats is the only thing that guarantees that Democrats — rather than McConnell — will have a say on which bills come to the Senate floor for debate. It would also give them the ability to more easily confirm Biden’s Cabinet picks, or his nominees to the federal judiciary and US Supreme Court.

Ossoff’s win in Georgia ensures Democrats can at least count on that razor-thin Senate majority.

They began with a speaker encouraging people to spread Covid-19. Really.

President Donald Trump is still refusing to concede the 2020 election to President-elect Joe Biden — and his most fervent supporters are on the same page.

As part of Trump’s last-ditch effort to overturn Biden’s victory, he and his supporters (in and out of Congress) have been hyping Congress’s expected certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory Wednesday as the final opportunity to “stop the steal.” Trump fans planned a slate of protests near the Capitol building in Washington, DC, starting with rallies on Tuesday. Yet another will take place on Wednesday, at which Trump himself says he will speak.

And they’re not off to a great start.

Trump fans began gathering on Tuesday in Freedom Plaza and outside the Capitol, where recently pardoned Trump ally Roger Stone spoke. At the Freedom Plaza event, a variety of fringe far-right speakers alternately profanely denounced antifa, said George Soros “owns” Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, described the coronavirus as “fake” — and, in one especially shocking moment, even encouraged rally attendees, who gathered mostly without masks despite the coronavirus pandemic, to hug each other.

“It’s a mass-spreader event!” said podcast host Clay Clark.

From the livestream, it’s difficult to see how many (if any) rally-goers followed his advice.

Later, staunch Trump ally and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell pushed long-debunked conspiracy theories about how Democrats allegedly stuffed ballot boxes. He also alluded to the possibility of civil war if Trump’s loss isn’t somehow overturned.

“You need to pray for our vice president to look up to God and say, ‘I need to make a decision, Lord,’ and make the right decision for our country,” Lindell said, alluding to Mike Pence’s role overseeing Wednesday’s Electoral College certification process. “You don’t have a [civil] war when the other side didn’t win anything ... they were trying to steal it from us.”

And another speech Tuesday evening featured a “victory or death!” chant.

Trump has heavily promoted the Wednesday portion of the event, touting it on Twitter as a “BIG Protest Rally” that “could be the biggest event in Washington, DC, history” — one aimed at pressuring members of Congress to stop the “steal” of the election from him. On Tuesday afternoon, he tweeted that he plans to speak to his supporters at 11 am on Wednesday. In other tweets, he echoed the rhetoric speakers at the rally used by calling antifa “a Terrorist Organization” and cited the size of the gatherings to put pressure on Republican senators who so far have not joined his effort to overthrow the election.

Of course, the election was not stolen — the Trump campaign hasn’t produced any credible evidence of fraud, and court after court has rejected Trump’s claims — and with the legal process played out, there’s little Trump and his allies can do at this point to overturn the election results. The rallies on Tuesday and Wednesday ultimately are a step in the grieving process for Trump supporters who will soon have to adjust to life under President Biden, as well as a window into what a significant portion of the Republican base looks like post-Trump.

While Clark’s public encouragement of coronavirus spread is definitely problematic, it’s also important to note that people still have a right to peaceably assemble, even in cases where speakers spread blatant lies and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But authorities are worried that Wednesday’s pro-Trump rallies could turn out likes ones last month that culminated in violence.

DC police are bracing for more unrest

During the most recent pro-Trump rallies in DC — which took place on December 12, two days before the Electoral College voted to officially make Biden president-elect — four people were stabbed during an altercation involving the Proud Boys, a far-right, racist, street-fighting group that was name-checked by Trump during one of the presidential debates. Authorities also say Proud Boys were responsible for burning a Black Lives Matter banner that hung outside the historically Black Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church.

There are indications that the Proud Boys planned to take things a step further this time around. On the right-wing social media site Parler, group chairman Enrique Tarrio wrote last week that the Proud Boys “will turn out in record numbers on January 6th but this time with a twist” — wearing all-black so members can blend in with left-wing counterprotesters.

“We are going to smell like you, move like you, and look like you,” Tarrio wrote. “The only thing we’ll do that’s us is think like us! Jan 6th is gonna be epic.”

But Tarrio was arrested while traveling into DC on Monday on property destruction charges stemming from the alleged December church vandalism. Ominously, Tarrio was also charged with “possession of high-capacity ammunition feeding devices, which is a legal term for a magazine that allows guns to hold additional bullets,” the Washington Post reported, adding that “the devices were found during the arrest.”

In an effort to prevent violence, DC police banned all firearms in the vicinity of where the pro-Trump rallies are planned, and Mayor Muriel Bowser has urged residents to stay away from the area. Tess Owen of Vice reported that the arrest of Tarrio and perceptions that police aren’t standing with pro-Trump protesters have caused a bit of a schism between far-right agitators and the cops, with “Tarrio’s supporters and ardent Trump fans ... putting the DC Police Department in their crosshairs” on right-wing social media sites. One Parler post even threatened to burn down a DC police precinct.

If the past is precedent, Trump is far more likely to pour fuel on the fire than he is to try and tamp things down, especially considering that things won’t go his way inside the Capitol on Wednesday. Ultimately, if the worst that happens is more reckless hugging during a pandemic, then DC authorities will chalk up Wednesday as a success.

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If Republicans win, these attacks on democracy will be validated as just another mobilizing tool.

Police officer Rusten Sheskey shot Blake seven times in the back last summer, leaving him paralyzed.

The white Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer who shot 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake seven times in the back last summer, leaving him paralyzed, will not face criminal charges. Kenosha County district attorney Michael Graveley announced the decision on Tuesday and said the determination was made after watching 40 hours of video footage and reviewing more than 1,000 pages of documents related to the case.

Graveley argued that the officer, 31-year-old Rusten Sheskey, fired his weapon to defend himself since there was “incontrovertible evidence” that Blake was armed with a knife, a detail that Blake revealed to officers, according to investigators. The district attorney added that the shooting took place in the context of a domestic abuse case. The two other officers who were present when Sheskey shot Blake were also not charged.

Blake’s attorney, Benjamin Crump, tweeted that his team is “immensely disappointed” in the decision because it “failed not only Jacob and his family but the community that protested and demanded justice.” Crump will continue to lead his own investigation into the shooting.

Sheskey shot Blake on August 23, about three months after the police killing of George Floyd set off unrest and protests against police brutality across the country. Blake’s shooting further fueled tensions, as protests broke out in Kenosha for several nights and the National Guard was called in. On the second night, a white vigilante — Kyle Rittenhouse, then 17 and from Antioch, Illinois, a town more than 20 miles away — reportedly set out to “guard businesses” and was caught on camera shooting two people to death and leaving a third injured; he entered not guilty pleas on three homicide charges on Tuesday.

Blake’s family was prepared for results similar to those in the Breonna Taylor investigation, in which officials also charged no officers in the late-night raid that ended her life, according to the Washington Post. “This has to be federally heard, not just for my son, but for everyone who suffered police brutality. Everyone. We can’t sit around anymore. We can’t wait,” Jacob Blake’s father told the Post.

It is rare for police officers to face serious criminal charges for an on-duty shooting. As Vox’s German Lopez reported, only “126 police officers have been arrested for murder or manslaughter due to an on-duty shooting” since 2005. “About 1,000 fatal police shootings are reported each year in the US — so the arrest rate is around 1 percent, never higher than 2 percent,” Lopez wrote. Officers are often protected by social and legal measures that offer them privileges during investigations and broad allowances with the use of force.

This culture of police violence and a criminal justice system that shields police officers has galvanized activists to call for the defunding of the police and other measures. Protests in Kenosha kicked off on Monday ahead of the announcement; the Kenosha mayor has set a curfew for eight consecutive days, and Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers called in the National Guard.

Crump said that the decision destroys trust in the justice system and signals to officers that “it’s okay for police to abuse their power and recklessly shoot their weapon.” Crump and his co-counsel announced they also plan to continue with a civil lawsuit and “fight for systemic change in policing and transparency at all levels.”

Glory be, after years and years and years and years of House Republicans poisoning legislation with procedural motions, which a handful of Democrats would never fail to participate in, the House of Representatives in the 117th Congress has new rules. Those new rules make that procedure, the Motion to Recommit, far less dangerous.

Now, the MTR could have been toothless all along, if Democratic leadership had been willing to be enforcers and do what Republicans do when they're in the majority—not allow members to stray and abet Republican dirty tricks. The MTR is the minority's last chance to amend legislation before final passage, and what Republicans always do in the minority is offer an amendment that they think will split Democrats and force them to take tough votes. Soon into the new 116th Congress, on key gun safety legislation, they did just that. They sullied a background checks bill by successfully amending it to require ICE be notified when undocumented immigrants try to buy guns. A thing that doesn't happen, but that 26 Democrats voted for because that's what they do all too frequently—eight times in the last two years. Well, they con't have to worry about that now. The new rules the House has adopted don't allow MTRs to amend legislation from the floor, they can only send the bill back to committee. That can theoretically kill bills, but it will be much easier to keep a majority together on clean legislation and it puts the MTR back into perspective, a simple procedural bill that no one really cares about.

So that's a very good thing. But it isn't the only very good thing the House did. It made sure that major initiatives from President-elect Joe Biden to save the nation's economy and environment can't be curtailed by deficit hawks. They've provided exemptions to the long-standing PAYGO provisions, the pay-as-you-go limitations on budget bills that requires any legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. The new rules don't do away with PAYGO, but give the Budget Committee chair the authority to exempt any legislation categorized as health and economic response to the pandemic as well as legislation responding to climate change from the PAYGO restrictions. The door for further healthcare reform and for the Green New Deal is open a little wider now.

The majority did give Republicans one thing, which they'll probably live to regret. They dropped a rule "barring members, officers and employees of the House from electronically disseminating, which includes sharing on social media, distorted or manipulated images, videos or audio files through official accounts." They intended to make disseminating "deepfakes" an ethics violation. Republicans were actually opposed to that, which tells you as much about Republicans as you need to know. So instead of banning it, they asked the House Ethics Committee to study the issue and come up with recommendations. Which means we're going to be seeing two years' of deepfaked crap from Republicans.

There are a few more key reforms in the package passed Monday, including a prohibition of members or staff from outing or retaliating against whistleblowers, and they made sure that oversight committees will have subpoena authority over current and former presidents and vice presidents. And current and former White House personnel, too. The committees in charge of two ongoing investigations, the Oversight Committee's investigation into the 2020 census count and the Coronavirus Crisis Subcommittee's investigation into potential political interference in the pandemic response, can continue their work seamlessly, not having to hold organizational meetings before issuing subpoenas.

In a nod toward normalizing procedure, the House strengthened a rule from last Congress that requires most legislation to go through at least one committee process of hearings and markup—the editing process of legislation, adding amendments and altering provisions—before being allowed on the floor. It allows any member to make a point of order on the floor to send bills not meeting that requirement back to committee. It doesn't apply to continuing resolutions to keep government operating after the fiscal year runs out, or to emergency appropriations, and it doesn't take effect until April 1, to give committees more time and flexibility during the pandemic.

Speaking of which, it allows proxy voting in the House for the next couple of months. There are also new rules to expand diversity among hearing witnesses, to implement gender neutral language in all official language. It requires committees to address "inequities on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, or national origin" in their work.

It's a smart, thoughtful package that's been in the works for months. It by no means Senate-proofs the upcoming Biden administration, but will help on the big parts—the spending necessary to get the nation running again. Since all spending bills have to originate in the House, Democrats will have  more leverage to get adequate spending bills through.

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Donald Trump’s inability to believe that he lost, and lost big, is a big problem for his fellow Republicans. But, as ever, it’s a bigger problem for the United States.

Trump’s refusal to engage with a reality he doesn’t like—the reality that he’s a loser—has pushed Republicans to discredit their party and seriously damage U.S. democracy. And he’s still lashing out at any Republican who doesn’t 100% back his assault on the election results, meaning that his die-hard supporters are tarnished for years to come while the people who half-heartedly refused to go along with him are dragged down now.

Trump is truly in denial, some people around him told The Washington Post. “He incontrovertibly thinks he won—and he thinks he won big—and the people around him don’t disabuse him of that because they don’t want to get crosswise, and because they told him he was going to win, so they can’t have it both ways,” someone identified as “one of Trump’s closest advisers” said. “It’s not about his inability to move on. It’s about his inability to even diagnose what happened. He won’t yet conduct the autopsy, if you will.”

“Honestly, I think that he cannot handle being the sitting Republican president that lost Georgia,” according to “a GOP official in frequent touch with the White House,” who also pointed out the total lack of strategy or consideration involved in Trump’s attacks on the Georgia election results, saying “Let’s say you get Raffensperger to commit fraud and get you the 11,000 votes—what does that even get you?” After all, “You still need three other states. I don’t understand what the ‘win’ is here. There’s no strategy.”

But Trump has the best and brightest minds of the Republican Party on board with this lack of strategy. Mostly. 

Former Supreme Court clerk Josh Hawley plans to object to counting the electors from Pennsylvania when Congress counts the electors on Wednesday. Fellow former Supreme Court clerk Ted Cruz isn’t saying what state or states he plans to object to. He’s just going to object. To something. Thereby cementing his loyalty to the guy who called his wife ugly and said his father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And none of them are doing it because they join Trump in believing the election was stolen, as one Washington Post source who actually went on the record under his own name pointed out.

“I think it is revealing that there is not a single senator who is arguing that the election was stolen from President Trump,” Josh Holmes, “an outside adviser to McConnell,” said. “The divide in the party is whether it’s appropriate to pull the pin on an electoral college grenade, hoping that there are enough responsible people standing around who can shove it back in before they detonate American democracy.”

It’s performative, and the performance is for Trump and—crucially—for his base, who Trump has scammed into believing his lies about the stolen election, and who people like Hawley and Cruz want to vote for them in 2024. This assault on the will of the voters is basically the kickoff of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Other Republicans are on board out of fear now, as Trump lashes out at anyone who doesn’t lick his boots enthusiastically enough. Sen. Tom Cotton, another 2024 hopeful, declined to go along with the effort to overturn the election in Congress on Wednesday, and Trump quickly threatened him by tweet, saying “Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!”

Trump is fomenting violence in the streets of Washington, D.C., for Wednesday while whipping up an assault on election results in Congress the same day. This is an unspeakably awful moment in the history of a nation that has had its full share of unspeakably awful moments. The only way to salvage anything positive out of it is to discredit not just Trump but the Republicans who have so cravenly supported him—many of them in the hope that not only will it be advantageous to them in the 2024 primary but that these maneuvers will be a practice run for successfully overturning an election in the future—and the violent white supremacists who are his literal foot soldiers.

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Pennsylvania Republicans refuse to seat a victorious Democrat, echoing similar moves elsewhere.

The event ticket sales platform is far from perfect, but some counties say it’s their best and only option.

In the midst of a disorganized, decentralized, and disappointing coronavirus vaccine rollout in the United States, some states and counties are turning to unlikely tools to get their allotted vaccines out to as many people as possible. In many Florida counties, for instance, Eventbrite has become the only way to sign up for the vaccine.

As it has done with pretty much every aspect of this pandemic, the federal government is largely leaving it to individual states to figure out how to distribute vaccines. Each state has had to come up with its own protocol and priority list. And despite having months to prepare for the tremendous undertaking, many health departments still scrambled to figure out some kind of system — seemingly at the last minute — when it came to making sure that people who are eligible for the vaccines can make appointments to get them.

Unlike many states that are only giving vaccines to people who work in high-risk professions, Florida allows anyone age 65 and older to get a vaccine, due to a last-minute executive order from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has left the actual logistics of distributing those vaccines to counties and local health systems.

“These guys are much more competent to be able to deliver health care services than a state government could ever be,” DeSantis told a CNN reporter on Monday.

With millions of suddenly eligible recipients and no statewide distribution plan, county health departments in Florida had to find a way to get as many people signed up as quickly as possible. Enter Eventbrite.

Florida’s Brevard County planned to use phone lines for appointments, but the phone system didn’t work, according to The Verge. The “only option,” the county told The Verge, was Eventbrite, a site best known for offering tickets to shows and concerts. Several other Florida counties, including Manatee, Nassau, Collier, Sarasota, Flagler, and Pasco, have decided to do the same.

While quickly distributing vaccines to people on the priority list is certainly a good thing, there are some issues here. Fake Eventbrite sites that charge people to make nonexistent appointments have apparently popped up. And relying solely on Eventbrite means people who don’t have access to or know how to use the internet won’t be able to sign up to be vaccinated.

Then again, other Florida counties simply decided to give out vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis, which has led to stories of seniors camping out overnight in hours-long lines to get their shots. Hillsborough and Pinellas counties rolled out their own vaccine registration websites on Monday, which promptly crashed along with their phone scheduling services. Compared to those options, maybe Eventbrite doesn’t seem so bad.

“We are actively exploring how our platform can best support the effort to increase access to vaccines,” an Eventbrite spokesperson said in a statement to Recode. “We recommend anyone registering for any COVID-19-related event verify and direct questions to their local health service officials.”

Eventbrite didn’t respond to request for information on how it will handle any personal health data provided by people who sign up for vaccine slots on its service, or what it’s doing, if anything, to address the reports of fake vaccine event scams. The Florida Department of Health has not responded to Recode’s request for comment about whether it recommends that counties rely on Eventbrite for vaccine sign-ups.

Florida isn’t alone in its approach. Other health departments and facilities across the country have also turned to tech companies to assist in vaccine distribution. Louisiana’s Department of Public Health offers a list of pharmacies with available Covid-19 vaccines in a document on its website that simply links out to some pharmacies’ Facebook pages. New Jersey’s Ocean Health Initiatives (OHI) has taken to creating Facebook events to advertise its vaccination distribution events, although eligible recipients must register on OHI’s website (not on Facebook). California’s Stanford Medicine made an algorithm to determine which of its workers should get the vaccine first, only for most of its residents and fellows to be left off the list while administrators and people who work from home got a spot on it. And New York state’s ParCare Community Health Network had patients sign up for vaccine slots via a Google form (ParCare is currently being investigated for vaccine fraud, but that’s not related to its use of Google forms).

The vaccine distribution situation mirrors other occasions during the pandemic where technology companies have been tapped to do the work that could have been done by public health systems. The US Department of Health and Human Services enlisted Palantir to create a brand new system for tracking health data and TeleTracking, a software company, to run it. Meanwhile, many states used Apple and Google’s exposure notification tool to power digital contact tracing apps. The federal government declined to use the tool for a nationwide app.

With this patchwork of vaccine distribution policies and practices, vaccination rates have varied wildly across the country, and no state has done things particularly well. The federal government had hoped to administer the first dose of the vaccine to 20 million people by the end of 2020 — a goal it did not come close to meeting. The Washington Post reports that, out of the 15.4 million doses that have been distributed, only 4.6 million people had received their first vaccination shots as of Monday night.

Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, wrote in the Washington Post that any delays in vaccine distribution meant that people could get sick or die who otherwise would have been protected. He laid the blame on the federal government’s decision to simply supply vaccines to the states without providing the necessary resources to ensure their distribution. This left “these relatively poorly funded agencies” that were already “squeezed and stretched” from the previous nine months to once again figure out some kind of solution for themselves.

No surprise, then, that the initial vaccine rollout didn’t go as smoothly as planned in Florida or elsewhere in the US. Nor is it a surprise that some Florida counties used Eventbrite to schedule inoculations. Even a hastily deployed third-party event platform with potential for fraud and misuse is arguably better than nothing at all. But many would agree that it shouldn’t have come to this in the first place.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) said he and his family were violently terrorized by “Antifa scumbags” on Monday night but video evidence (below) shows a group of about 15 people holding signs saying “protect democracy”, speaking through a megaphone, and writing on the sidewalk with chalk.

Hawley has been making headlines this week as he’s part of a delusional group of Republicans plotting to overturn the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump on Wednesday by objecting to the certification of electoral votes.

Tweeted Hawley: “Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence.”

I dunno, Josh. You’re the one trying to overthrow democracy. This looks pretty tame:https://t.co/31l322ihdn

— Kim Masters (@kimmasters) January 5, 2021

The Washington Post reports: “Demonstrators with ShutDownDC, which organized the protest, told The Washington Post that they did not engage in vandalism or even knock on Hawley’s door. A 50-minute video shared by the group shows protesters writing in chalk on the sidewalk, chanting through a megaphone and at one point leaving a copy of the Constitution on Hawley’s doorstep. Police in Vienna, Va., who responded to the protest, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post late Monday. The group’s video shows several officers asking protesters to quiet down, but then standing by as the crowd continued with its demonstration.”

Watch the video:

On Tuesday morning, Hawley objected to the post’s report, tweeting: “@washingtonpost this morning printing outright lies from the Antifa group who now describe themselves as sweet angels. BS. You screamed through bullhorns, shouted down my wife when she asked you to leave, vandalized property, pounded on our door, and terrorized neighbors. And didn’t have the guts to do it in daylight, but only under cover of darkness so you could hide. You’re scum. And we won’t be intimidated.”

And didn’t have the guts to do it in daylight, but only under cover of darkness so you could hide. You’re scum. And we won’t be intimidated

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 5, 2021

The post GOP Senator Josh Hawley Says ‘Antifa Scumbags’ Violently Terrorized His Family But Video Evidence Shows Otherwise: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Terri Nunn, lead singer of Berlin, apologized for performing at Trump’s maskless Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party in Palm Beach, Florida. Nunn was hit with backlash after the event that also swallowed up recording artist Taylor Dayne, who attended, and rapper Vanilla Ice, who also performed.

Wrote Nunn on the band’s Facebook page: “I am truly sorry I performed at Mar-a-Lago and would not have done so if I’d known what I learned while I was there. My goal in performing was not to support a political party. I see now that that’s not the way it appeared and I am apologetic for that as well.”

“The contract stated it was a small Covid-safe event for the members of Mar-a-Lago,” Nunn continued. “Unfortunately it was not Covid-safe anywhere in Florida. I had no idea masks and social distancing were not required. I thought I was current on all Covid news everywhere, but clearly I was not. I was shocked by Florida and Mar-a-Lago’s lack of regard for the pandemic and if I’d known I would never have gone.”

“Once I fulfilled my contractual obligation, I left the event as quickly as I could,” Nunn added. “It is a mistake I regret. I took a Covid 19 test yesterday and tested negative. My apologies to those in the LGBTQ community who thought my performance was a statement against them. I have been and always will be fully supportive.”

The post Berlin’s Terri Nunn Apologizes for Performing at Trump Mar-a-Lago NYE Bash appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

(202): Imagine we only get one cock for the rest of your life. I’d pick his dick. That good!

The Washington Post has just released the full one-hour audio recording of Donald Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger. Also on the call on Trump’s behalf were chief of staff Mark Meadows and prominent conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell.

Over the course of the rambling call, Trump appears to threaten or extort Raffensberger and state legal counsel Ryan Germany. He argues that Raffensberger needs to “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”

At one point in the conversation, after Raffensberger states that he cannot legally provide requested data, Trump says “I don’t want to know how. You guys can do it very confidentially.”

Trump’s intent is clear throughout the conversation. He wants Raffensberger to “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state by any means necessary, wants the state to illegally leak information it cannot otherwise provide him, wants the state to back up his evidenceless claims of fraud, and threatens both officials with unspecified alleged crimes if they do not comply.

[Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) called his colleagues' bluff yesterday.]

Yesterday, the newly elected House of Representatives' held its organizational session to recognize the credentials of those elected, select a Speaker, and adopt rules for the counting presidential electors, among other start-of-session matters.

During the session, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) filed an objection to seating those members purportedly elected in states in which the Trump Campaign and its allies are challenging the certified vote counts (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). Rep. Roy, who is on record opposing efforts to challenge validly appointed presidential electors, explained his objection:

I do not make this objection lightly and take no pleasure in it, but believe that I am compelled to do so because a number of my colleagues — whom I hold in high regard — have publicly stated that they plan to object to the acceptance of electors from those particular six states due to their deeply held belief that those states conducted elections plagued by statewide, systemic fraud and abuse that leaves them absolutely no way for this chamber or our constituents to trust the validity of their elections.

Such allegations – if true – raise significant doubts about the elections of at least some of the members of the United States House of Representatives that, if not formally addressed, could cast a dark cloud of suspicion over the validity of this body for the duration of the 117th Congress.  After all, those representatives were elected through the very same systems — with the same ballot procedures, with the same signature validations, with the same broadly applied decisions of executive and judicial branch officials — as were the electors chosen for the President of the United States under the laws of those states, which have become the subject of national controversy. And while the legislatures of those states have sent us no formal indication that the results of these elections should not be honored by this body, it would confound basic human reason if the presidential results were to face objection while the congressional results of the same process escaped without public scrutiny.

While the Constitution and the 12th Amendment do not make Congress the judge of the states' presidential electors, it does require us to be the arbiters of the elections to this body. If the electors for the office of the president were not in question, neither would be the election certificates of my colleagues present here today.

Rep. Roy's objection was rejected 371-2.

President-elect Joe Biden has warned that climate change will pose future threats for the U.S. military as it worsens unrest in volatile regions and creates new dangers to its facilities from rising seas, powerful storms and harsh droughts.

But the Defense Department also offers a silver lining on climate change for the new president: a huge appetite for clean energy sources and a massive budget to help accelerate the development of new technologies needed to curb greenhouse gases and harden infrastructure to protect against worsening climate impacts.

Biden has called climate change an "existential threat" and promised to spend $2 trillion to expand clean energy and build resilient facilities over the next four years. But that ambitious plan will need approval from Congress — a heavy lift that's likely to draw resistance from Republicans who may control the Senate and block any major green plans. That's where the Pentagon can provide some help.

The Pentagon has long been a crucial customer for clean energy technologies, driving the country's adoption of solar power and the rollout of mobile batteries. Now, its $700 billion budget may offer an opportunity for the Biden administration to help scale-up industries such as those producing electric vehicles and advanced batteries.

"Start with the fact the Department of Defense is the single largest energy user," said Sherri Goodman, a deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security under Obama and now a senior fellow at the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program, a think tank. "What it does and how it uses its energy, how it reduces its emissions, makes its bases more resilient to climate threats — that helps all America by learn by example."

Though its energy consumption has been declining for years, the Defense Department is still by far the largest energy user in the federal government — accounting for more than three-quarters of total government energy usage and 15 times the energy consumption of the Post Office, the No. 2 consumer — and it emits about 1 percent of the total U.S. carbon emissions.

The Pentagon helped jump-start the U.S. solar industry back in 2007, when the Air Force contracted to build a 14-megawatt solar farm at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, then the largest plant of its kind in the country. Since then, the industry has built solar projects more than 40 times that size, and the military has been one its biggest customers, adding more than 130 megawatts to bases in nearly three dozen states.

Former President Barack Obama also pushed the Pentagon to experiment with biofuels to reduce its ships' dependence on oil, and though a "Great Green Fleet" powered by biofuels from home-grown crops failed to live up its promise, then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus found success in even simple solutions: He ordered refitting ships to replace all their bulbs with high efficiency technology, saving power and allowing the ships to stay at sea longer. And the aviation biofuels developed during the period are now being used by airlines to acquire carbon offsets required by European aviation authorities.

U.S. troops also saw other benefits from the Obama years. Batteries carried by soldiers to power radios and other equipment went from 13 pounds to nine pounds, easing their load while they are on maneuvers.

Though Congress often guides the Defense Department on energy conservation projects through the annual National Defense Authorization Act, President Donald Trump reversed many of Obama's efforts to use the federal government to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to fight climate change, including through a 2018 executive order revoking specific carbon reduction targets for federal agencies. And military leaders who resented being tools of a policy they didn't feel contributed to the fighting mission were relieved to see an end to that chapter.

Biden is likely to lean on his incoming Defense secretary, former Gen. Lloyd Austin, to ramp up the use of renewable energy sources while hardening the nation's military bases to the dangers from climate change. Though Austin was tapped over Michele Flournoy, an Obama DoD official with deep experience fighting climate change, experts say he will be keenly aware of the dangers hurricanes and fires pose to bases, and will bring experience dealing with the complexities of fuel logistics.

As commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Austin oversaw the first impact of climate change in a theater of operations, in 2015, said Andrew Holland, chief operating officer for the think tank the American Security Project.

"He should know the importance of this, even as he doesn’t have a long record working on this issue,” he said.

Biden's transition team declined to comment on his plans, and pointed to his posted climate plans.

Biden will likely pick up an Obama-era program in which bases in Nevada and Hawaii built microgrids, enabling them to keep their lights on and continue operations even if the civilian power supply failed. The maturity of solar and wind technology has also driven down prices, and U.S. bases in many places may be able to install their own generation at a lower cost than fossil power.

Biden will also get the advantage of the cultural shift toward efficiency and renewables engendered by Obama and his Defense officials, Goodman said. Veterans have entered the clean energy workforce in higher numbers than other parts of the workforce in states like Ohio, where 11 percent of the clean energy workforce were veterans — double their representation in other industries, according to a report from Clean Energy Trust, a Midwestern clean energy investment fund. And junior officers who were still learning how to implement energy efficiency measures during the Obama years have now advanced to positions of responsibility inside the military.

The threats to its bases from storms packing a stronger punch because of climate change and increased flooding may be the most expensive risks for the Pentagon now. Bases in Florida have suffered billions of dollars in damages in recent years, and the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia has flooded nearly a dozen times in recent years because of rising seas.

The Iraq War also drove home the need to find more fuel efficient ways of operating, as fuel truckers had among the highest casualty rates in the war. Between 2003 and 2007, nearly 3,000 contractors died or were injured transporting oil to forward operating bases, according to an American Security Project report. Dependence on fuel oil for tanks and Humvees prompted the commander of forces in Iraq — who was later Secretary of Defense — Gen. Jim Mattis to ask military technologists to "unleash us from the tether of fuel."

That sentiment dovetails with Biden's plan to rapidly expand the U.S. manufacturing capacity for electric vehicles — an effort where the Pentagon could play a similar role as it did with solar power over a decade ago.

"We're going to buy electric vehicles," Holland said. "There will be an increased push to make that a part of energy resilience as well."

But if Biden wishes to wield the military's energy budget to push climate goals, he will likely have to find a way to exercise greater control over the purchasing decisions.

Ben Steinberg, now a consultant with Venn Strategies, was the key Energy Department liaison with the Defense Department during part of the Obama administration, and he helped link up DOE energy efficiency and technology programs to the appropriate offices in the Pentagon. He warns that while DoD has a lot of money to invest in research and in scaling up solar, spending decisions are made by thousands of different people across bases, ships and other installations.

"DoD is not a monolithic entity," he said. "It's hard to consolidate all of that and have the buying power all working together. My advice is to drive it at the highest level possible and have the [White House Office of Management and Budget] extremely involved in purchasing things and have the OMB drive it with tools. That's with things like electric vehicles, clustering how you purchase renewable energy so multiple bases can go into a deal together and costs can come down."

Biden may also be able to duck some of the resistance Obama faced from conservatives. Sen. Jim Inhofe, now chair of the Armed Services Committee, previously lambasted Obama for putting policy objectives ahead of military ones. But solar and wind power in conjunction with batteries have fallen so much in cost that fighting climate change and advancing the Pentagon's fighting mission are no longer in conflict.

"So long as the military spending is mission and capabilities driven first, if that spending has broader economic and climate benefits, that’s great," said Nick Loris, a fellow in Energy and Environmental Policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We shouldn’t mandate pricier electricity or fuels on the military unless DOD determines the national security benefits justify the higher costs, which hasn’t always been the case. That diverts resources away from more productive use. However, if the green technologies are cheaper and enhance mission capabilities, all the better."

A moment of joy in a treacherous time for health care workers was shared by Sanford Health in South Dakota:

“Eric Vanderlee, a registered nurse in Canton, South Dakota, has been helping administer the COVID-19 vaccine to local health care workers. But he noticed something strange when he went to give the shot to one fellow Sanford Health employee. Robby Vargas-Cortes, an EMS supervisor and Eric’s boyfriend, had an engagement ring taped to his arm. Robby got his vaccine – and an enthusiastic yes from his now fiancé. Congratulations, Eric and Robby!”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Eric Vander Lee (@ejvl)

The post Nurse Administering COVID Vaccine to His EMS Supervisor Boyfriend Finds Engagement Ring Taped to His Arm: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Trump told the Georgia official: “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

President Donald Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to “find” almost 12,000 nonexistent votes during a Saturday phone call, according to a report by Amy Gardner of the Washington Post. Inventing those votes would change the outcome of the election in that state, tipping its electoral votes to Trump over President-elect Joe Biden.

Over the course of a more than hour-long phone call, a recording of which was obtained by the Post, Trump raised a series of baseless, debunked conspiracy theories — and variously cajoled and threatened Raffensperger to find some way to award him the victory in Georgia, a state Trump lost by 11,779 votes.

“All I want to do is this,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”

Ryan Germany, the general counsel to the Georgia secretary of state’s office, was also on the call, according to the Post, as were White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell.

Trump had earlier acknowledged the call in a tweet, but framed it very differently, claiming the men spoke about allegations of election fraud, which Raffensperger has disproven several times. Sunday’s Washington Post story reveals what was discussed in far more detail.

“I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia,” Trump tweeted Sunday morning. “He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

Audio from the full 62-minute call was published by the Post Sunday, including an exchange where Trump threatens Raffensperger and Germany with imminent legal consequences should they fail to overturn the already certified results.

“That’s a criminal offense,” Trump tells Raffensperger and Germany on the call, apparently in reference to Raffensperger not reporting made-up instances of election fraud. “And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.”

Trump also raised a number of conspiracy theories resembling those promoted by onetime Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, who was cut loose by the Trump campaign’s legal team as her election fraud allegations became increasingly outlandish.

Powell, who has pushed a series of election lawsuits with scant — and sometimes purely fictitious — evidence of fraud. She has also repeatedly falsely asserted that voting machines designed by Dominion Voting Systems helped to steal the 2020 election from Trump.

In reality, President-elect Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election by 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and with a popular vote margin of more than 7 million votes. Recounts in battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin — both won by Biden — have turned up no evidence of large-scale fraud or irregularities that could have affected the results of the election.

In all 50 states and Washington, DC, the election results have been carefully reviewed by state officials and certified as accurate. And Dominion’s machines have been found to have operated correctly.

Nonetheless, Trump aired a version of the Dominion conspiracy during his Saturday call.

“Now, do you think it’s possible that they shredded ballots in Fulton County?” Trump asked Germany on the call. “Because that’s what the rumor is. And also that Dominion took out machines. That Dominion is really moving fast to get rid of their machinery. Do you know anything about that? Because that’s illegal, right?”

As Germany affirmed on the call, none of Trump’s allegations are true.

Despite the Trump legal team’s move to disavow Powell, Trump has reportedly remained enamored with her theories. According to a New York Times report from December, he briefly considered naming Powell as special counsel to investigate his baseless claims of voter fraud, though he was ultimately talked down by aides.

And as recently as Sunday, he retweeted a message from Powell alleging — again, without even a shred of evidence — “massive fraud.”

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s remarks on the call Saturday raise the possibility of additional legal problems for a president already facing quite a few potential criminal investigations upon leaving office. The report noted, however, that there is no clear-cut offense revealed on the call and that any possible charges would ultimately be “subject to prosecutorial discretion.”

As CNN reporter Ryan Struyk pointed out on Twitter Sunday, US law makes it a crime to “‘knowingly and willfully ... attempt to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process’ by ‘the procurement ... of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false.’”

Trump may also have landed himself in legal peril at the state level. According to Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, “conspiracy to commit election fraud” and “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud” are both crimes in Georgia, and some legal experts believe Trump’s comments Saturday violated state law.

Other reporters, such as Business Insider’s Grace Panetta, have pointed out that Trump’s comments are strikingly similar to those he was impeached over in late 2019, after his pressure campaign against the president of Ukraine seeking to extort an investigation into Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, came to light.

In a statement Sunday, a Biden adviser condemned Trump’s election pressure campaign.

“We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place,” former Obama White House counsel and current Biden senior adviser Bob Bauer said.

Saturday’s call isn’t the first time Trump has tried to subvert democracy

Though Sunday’s Washington Post scoop provides arguably the starkest example of Trump’s long-running attempts to subvert democracy in order to remain in power — not to mention a more than passing resemblance to President Richard Nixon’s presidency-ending tapes — it is by no means the only time Trump has mounted an effort of this sort since losing reelection.

In at least three other battleground states that he lost to Biden — Arizona, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — Trump has directly reached out to lawmakers and other officials to urge them to help him overturn the election results in their states, potentially awarding him an unelected second term in office.

In Pennsylvania, one Republican lawmaker — state Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward — told the New York Times that she chose not to push back on Trump’s baseless fraud accusations.

“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” she said in December, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

But Trump’s antidemocratic efforts have been most acute in Georgia — possibly because the state remains in the news this month, more than 60 days after the presidential election, in the run-up to two crucial Senate runoffs this Tuesday that will decide partisan control of the chamber.

In his call Saturday, Trump suggested that this was the case to Raffensperger.

“You have a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president — you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam,” Trump said on the call. “Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president.”

Georgia voters set a record for early-voting turnout ahead of Tuesday’s runoffs, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, with more than 3 million votes cast ahead of Election Day on January 5. But as Vox’s Aaron Rupar has written, there are some indications Trump’s efforts to spread doubt about the security of the election may have depressed Republican participation so far.

And Republicans are likely to need every vote to ensure victories in both races. Polling suggests that both races are more or less a toss-up: According to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages, Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock lead incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler by around 2 percentage points each.

Trump will be back in Georgia on Monday for a final preelection rally, though if his last Georgia rally is any indication, he will likely stray to other topics, such as his grievances against Raffensperger and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

“You would be respected, really respected if this thing could be straightened out before the election,” Trump told Raffensperger on the call Saturday. “You have a big election coming up on Tuesday.”

To date, Raffensperger has resisted Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, and Sunday, responded to Trump’s characterization of the call by tweeting, “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true. The truth will come out.”

Haven, the joint venture formed by three of America's most powerful companies to lower costs and improve outcomes in health care, is disbanding after three years, CNBC has learned exclusively. From a report: The company began informing employees Monday that it will shut down by the end of next month, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter. Many of the Boston-based firm's 57 workers are expected to be placed at Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway or JPMorgan Chase as the firms each individually push forward in their efforts, and the three companies are still expected to collaborate informally on healthcare projects, the people said. The announcement three years ago that the CEOs of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase had teamed up to tackle one of the biggest problems facing corporate America -- high and rising costs for employee health care -- sent shock waves throughout the world of medicine. Shares of healthcare companies tumbled on fears about how the combined might of leaders in technology and finance could wring costs out of the system. Brooke Thurston, a spokeswoman for Haven, confirmed the company's plans to close.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supply issues have hamstrung the rollout of the latest generation of video game consoles. Even now, nearly two months after the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S released, Microsoft is still scrambling to meet demand and has reportedly reached out to chipmaker AMD to fast-track production on its end. From a report: AMD manufactures the GPU and CPU for both consoles, so if it's able to push out its chips faster, Microsoft could, in theory, churn out more consoles by extension. As spotted by VGC, Microsoft is "working as hard as we can" to pump out more systems and has even contacted AMD for help, according to Xbox head Phil Spencer in a recent appearance on the Major Nelson Radio podcast hosted by Xbox Live director of programming Larry Hyrb "I get some people [asking], 'why didn't you build more? Why didn't you start earlier? Why didn't you ship them earlier?' I mean, all of those things," Spencer said. "It's really just down to physics and engineering. We're not holding them back: We're building them as fast as we can. We have all the assembly lines going. I was on the phone last week with [CEO and president] Lisa Su at AMD [asking], 'How do we get more? How do we get more?' So it's something that we're constantly working on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This weekend Forbes ran a thought-provoking article by "a digital marketer of 25 years" who now helps marketers audit their digital campaigns for ad fraud: When P&G turned off $200 million of their digital ad spending, they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Chase reduced their programmatic reach from 400,000 sites showing its ads to 5,000 sites (a 99% decrease), they saw NO CHANGE in business outcomes. When Uber turned off $120 million of their digital ad spending meant to drive more app installs, they saw NO CHANGE in the rate of app installs. When big brands stopped spending on digital ads, nothing happened. Even further back in time, in 2012, eBay turned off their paid search ad spending, and saw NO CHANGE in sales coming from those sources... Big brands turned off millions of dollars of digital ad spending, and saw no change in business outcomes. Small businesses tuned their digital marketing and reduced the number of ad impressions, clicks, and traffic to their sites, but saw business activity go up, instead of down. Much of the problem with digital advertising today stems from marketers' obsession with big numbers. But big numbers of ads and clicks do not translate into more business activity and sales. They are just large numbers in dashboards and spreadsheets. Marketers could be spending far fewer dollars and getting the same levels of business outcomes; or spending the dollars more smartly in digital and getting even more business outcomes than they are now.

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Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: AMD filed a patent on using chiplets for a GPU with hints on why it has waited this long to extend their CPU strategy to GPUs. The latency between chiplets poses more of a performance problem for GPUs, and AMD is attempting to solve the problem with a new interconnect called high bandwidth passive crosslink. This new interconnect will allow each GPU to more effectively communicate with each other and the CPU. "With NVIDIA working on its own MCM design with Hopper architecture, it's about time that we left monolithic GPU designs in the past and enable truly exponential performance growth," argues Wccftech. And Hot Hardware delves into the details, calling it a "hybrid CPU-FPGA design that could be enabled by Xilinx tech." While they often aren't as great as CPUs on their own, FPGAs can do a wonderful job accelerating specific tasks... [A]n FPGA in the hands of a capable engineer can offload a wide variety of tasks from a CPU and speed processes along. Intel has talked a big game about integrating Xeons with FPGAs over the last six years, but it hasn't resulted in a single product hitting its lineup. A new patent by AMD, though, could mean that the FPGA newcomer might be ready to make one of its own... AMD made 20 claims in its patent application, but the gist is that a processor can include one or more execution units that can be programmed to handle different types of custom instruction sets. That's exactly what an FPGA does... AMD has been working on different ways to speed up AI calculations for years. First the company announced and released the Radeon Impact series of AI accelerators, which were just big headless Radeon graphics processors with custom drivers. The company doubled down on that with the release of the MI60, its first 7-nm GPU ahead of the Radeon RX 5000 series launch, in 2018. A shift to focusing on AI via FPGAs after the Xilinx acquisition makes sense, and we're excited to see what the company comes up with.

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"When you do computer programming, what sort of mental work are you doing?" asks science/tech journalist Clive Thompson: For a long time, folks have speculated on this. Since coding involves pondering hierarchies of symbols, maybe the mental work is kinda like writing or reading? Others have speculated it's more similar to the way our brains process math and puzzles. A group of MIT neuroscientists recently did fMRI brain-scans of young adults while they were solving a small coding challenge using a textual programming language (Python) and a visual one (Scratch Jr.). The results? The brain activity wasn't similar to when we process language. Instead, coding seems to activate the "multiple demand network," which — as the scientists note in a public-relations writeup of their work — "is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles." So, coding is more like doing math than processing language? Sorrrrrrt of ... but not exactly so. The scientists saw activity patterns that differ from those you'd see during math, too. The upshot: Coding — in this (very preliminary!) work, anyway — looks to be a little different from either language or math. As the note, in a media release... "Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing...." Just anecdotally — having interviewed hundreds of coders and computer scientists for my book CODERS — I've met amazing programmers and computer scientists with all manner of intellectual makeups. There were math-heads, and there were people who practically counted on their fingers. There were programmers obsessed with — and eloquent in — language, and ones gently baffled by written and spoken communication. Lots of musicians, lots of folks who slid in via a love of art and visual design, then whose brains just seized excitedly on the mouthfeel of algorithms.

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Today a staff writer at Salon argues "The Mandalorian" has redeemed the Star Wars universe: The Disney+ series "The Mandalorian" has been both a critical triumph and commercial success. In my judgment, it's the most compelling live-action story in the "Star Wars" universe since 1983's "Return of The Jedi". To that end, the story in "The Mandalorian's" first two seasons about a mysterious bounty hunter and "the child" (who is actually more than 50 years old) he's entrusted with as they navigate their way through a dangerous world — rife with "scum and villainy," where the remnants of the evil Empire still terrorize the galaxy — has accomplished something difficult in science fiction and other genre entertainment. Longtime and serious "Star Wars" aficionados are enthusiastic about "The Mandalorian's" attention to detail and obvious love and respect for George Lucas's "Star Wars" universe. More casual "Star Wars" fans can enjoy the series for its story of family, friendship and adventure, and of course for "baby Yoda," aka Grogu, "the Child," a character described by legendary film director Werner Herzog as "heartbreakingly beautiful...." Where does "The Mandalorian" go next? Why is it such a compelling TV series and story? Is there such a thing as too much "fan service" in a genre film or TV series? Why has "The Mandalorian" been such a success, compared to the most recent "Star Wars" films? Disney and Lucasfilm have recently announced plans for 11 new TV series and at least three more feature films. At what point does "Star Wars" become overexposed and made into something common, a parody of itself? In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Bill Slavicsek, one of the writers and developers of the much-beloved "Star Wars" roleplaying game from West End Games. He is also the author of the "Star Wars Sourcebook," "A Guide to the Star Wars Universe," many guides to RPGs and, more recently, "Defining a Galaxy: 30 Years in a Galaxy Far, Far Away...." He was one of the main game designers for the Dungeons and Dragons RPGs and is currently the lead writer for the massively multi-player RPG Elder Scrolls Online. Fair warning: This conversation contains spoilers for Season Two of "The Mandalorian," which is now available on the Disney+ streaming service. Meanwhile CinemaBlend shares some commentary from another source, writing that "We need more Star Wars discourse like this." No arguing about bloodlines, or one director undoing the plotlines laid down by another. Just all of us, being amused by a cat who delightfully thinks that he or she can catch the lightsaber that a brooding Kylo Ren is tossing away during a pivotal moment in J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker... And it even has Mark Hamill's seal of approval... Kitty cats aside, it's a very good time to be a Star Wars fan. The Mandalorian just wrapped up an incredible season of television on Disney+ and Kathleen Kennedy recently ushered in a wave of new programming that will keep Star Wars on our radars for years to come.

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Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the New York Times: Twirling above a strip of land at the mouth of Rotterdam's harbor [in the Netherlands] is a wind turbine so large it is difficult to photograph. The turning diameter of its rotor is longer than two American football fields end to end. Later models will be taller than any building on the mainland of Western Europe. Packed with sensors gathering data on wind speeds, electricity output and stresses on its components, the giant whirling machine in the Netherlands is a test model for a new series of giant offshore wind turbines planned by General Electric. When assembled in arrays, the wind machines have the potential to power cities, supplanting the emissions-spewing coal- or natural gas-fired plants that form the backbones of many electric systems today... [A]lready the giant turbines have turned heads in the industry. A top executive at the world's leading wind farm developer called it a "bit of a leapfrog over the latest technology." And an analyst said the machine's size and advance sales had "shaken the industry." The prototype is the first of a generation of new machines that are about a third more powerful than the largest already in commercial service. As such, it is changing the business calculations of wind equipment makers, developers and investors. The G.E. machines will have a generating capacity that would have been almost unimaginable a decade ago. A single one will be able to turn out 13 megawatts of power, enough to light up a town of roughly 12,000 homes.

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